Donald Trump has urged Americans to come together after his assassination attempt, vowing that “evil” will not prevail. The former president, whose ear was grazed by a bullet fired during a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, said he would still address the Republican convention later this week. In a rare Oval Office speech last night, President Biden called on Americans to “lower the temperature in our politics”. Hamas says at least 90 people were killed in Israeli air strikes on Gaza targeting the leader of the terrorist group’s military wing. Israeli officials say it’s unclear whether they managed to take out Mohammed Deif – a nom de guerre meaning “the guest”, because he never stays in one place for more than a night – but that another suspected architect of the October 7 attacks was definitely killed. “Gloriosa España”, says La Razón, after Spain’s footballers beat England 2-1 to win the Euros for a record fourth time, and Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz defeated Novak Djokovic in the Wimbledon men’s final for a second year in a row. 🏆🇪🇸🏆

An image that defines the MAGA mindset

I am no fan of Donald Trump, says Tyler Austin Harper in The Atlantic. But when I first saw the iconic photo of him, fist raised, blood streaked across his cheek, hugged by secret service agents and backed by the American flag and the clear blue sky, I felt an emotion I later recognised, with some discomfort, as a “fluttering of unbidden nationalist zeal”. After all, what encapsulates the US ideal more than “bloody defiance and stubborn pride”, bordering on foolishness? No hunkering and no hiding, standing undaunted and undeterred, “fist pumping your way through an attempted murder”. It was a moment when Trump supporters’ idea of him – “strong, resilient, proud” – collided with reality.

Today, “Americans are not unified”. We are angry, bitter and divided; paranoid and afraid; “governed by two parties that seem constitutionally incapable of putting America above their own interests”. What happened on Saturday does nothing to change that. “Nor do a few seconds of real bravery absolve Trump of his sins” or make his political platform more palatable. But I would suggest that his critics spend some time contemplating this photograph. “The man, the flag, the blood, the fist.” It’s hard for those who hate him to inhabit the mind of one of Trump’s supporters, to understand his appeal without “immediately defaulting to simplifications like racism and misogyny”. This image gives us a “badly needed window into the MAGA mindset”, allowing everyone to see Trump through the eyes of his devotees: the promise of “toughness, vitality, and unbowing resolve at a moment when we are wavering, weak and irresolute before a graying future”.

🗳️⏳What happens next is anyone’s guess, says Edward Luce in the FT. But there are two things worth noting. First, Joe Biden is likely to get at least a temporary reprieve from the internal Democratic wrangling over whether he should step down as his party’s presidential nominee. And second, anyone predicting that Trump is now a shoo-in to win in November should temper their expectations. In 1981, Ronald Reagan got a huge ratings surge after he was shot by a lone gunman. “That boost evaporated within a few weeks.”

Britain has elected “the most irreligious parliament in history”, says The Times. Some 40% of MPs made a secular affirmation rather than a religious oath when being sworn into parliament last week, up from 24% at the start of the last parliament. Labour and the Liberal Democrats are equally ungodly, with 47% of each party’s MPs going secular; among the Tories, it was just 9%. That may be true, says the Rev Professor Ian Bradley in a letter to the newspaper, but “we have one of the most godly front benches for a long time”. The Chancellor, the Foreign Secretary and the Health Secretary have “all been explicit about their Christian faith”. Douglas Alexander, a business and trade minister, is “a son of the manse in the tradition of Gordon Brown”.

Most of us assume that if we saw a stranger committing a crime, we’d be able to identify them later in a police line-up, says The Conversation. Not so. Researchers in Australia showed 350 people a photograph of a “guilty” suspect, then asked them to pick out that same person from a photographic lineup. They found that when only minor changes were made to the guilty person’s appearance – slightly shorter hair, stubble shaved off, a change of clothes – they were 50% less likely to be identified.

You’ll miss us posh boys when we’re gone

There has been “loud crowing from all quarters”, says Giles Coren in The Times, about the general election’s expulsion of public schoolboys from public life. Every comprehensively educated commentator in the country – “which suddenly seems to be all of them” – has taken the opportunity this week to blow raspberries and shout, “Ha ha ha, we always hated you… and now you’re finished! Finished!” With just two members of Keir Starmer’s cabinet educated independently, it seems the days when “brightish chaps from good schools with a smattering of Latin and a high-elbowed cover drive” formed the rump of any parliament, regardless of ruling party, are over.

“But I think you’ll miss us.” The odd Jacob Rees-Mogg or Nicholas Soames “lolling on the benches and cracking gags” made the Commons a better place. They connected us to “values most people once held dear and traditions we once respected”. With no public schoolboys, who is going to hold open heavy doors for you when your hands are full? Who will give you their seat on a busy train? Who will say “fons et origo” and “mutatis mutandis” and who, when you get to Cambridge, will be impressed that you are the first in your family to go to university, if everyone else is too? Above all, after we’ve gone, who will you be able to blame when your “basic lack of talent, articulacy and wit” means you still can’t get a decent job or university place? “Who, then, will you say stole your rightful destiny by a mere accident of birth?”

Only a century ago, political violence was a near-constant, says Tom Holland on The Rest is History. Heads of state who were assassinated at the start of the 20th century included: the King of Italy (1900), US President William McKinley (1901), the King and the Prime Minister of Serbia (1903), the Governor-General of Finland (1904), the Governor of Mauritania (1905), the Prime Minister of Bulgaria (1907), the Prime Minister of Iran (1907), the King of Portugal (1908), the Emperor of China (1908), the Prime Minister of Egypt (1910), the Prime Minister of Russia (1911), the Prime Minister of Spain (1912), the President of Mexico (1913) and the King of Greece (1914). The list very much goes on.

It’s a specially trained protection dog that will set you back $150,000, says New York Magazine. US breeders Svalinn say their pricey pooch – an undisclosed mix of Dutch Shepherd, German Shepherd and Belgian Malinois – is a “one-of-a-kind hybrid”: a military-grade protection dog but with the “warmth and temperament of a conventional family pet”. The company sells no more than 20 a year, and only about 350 exist around the world – making it the perfect status symbol for the dog-loving super-rich. As one happy owner puts it: “I feel like we have a gentle Navy Seal in the house.”